home lab

Standing up Weathervane in the home lab will provide hands-on for developing skills like creating a template VM, creating a guest customization specification, working with some basic Linux commands, working with an app with multiple tiers, creating a guest customization specification, cloning VMs, and monitoring performance metrics. This post provides an overview of how I set up Weathervane in my home lab, an example of the results generated from the Weathervane runs, and a look at the performance metrics I observed in lab during the Weathervane runs.

Here is a quick walk through on creating a Nested vSphere 6 VSAN Lab. The lab requires three nested ESXi 6.0 hosts each configured with three hard disks and a VCSA 6.0. This post covers creating the nested ESXi hosts and configuring a VSAN cluster.

I set out to find a managed switch that would support 802.1q VLANs, could be managed (either by Web interface or CLI), would support Jumbo Frames, and was affordable. I came across the TP-Link TL-SG2424 24-Port Gigabit Smart Switch.

If you have trouble keeping up with all the different access UIs and servers in your lab (vCenter, vCOPs, vCO, NAS Admin UI, etc, etc, etc) JumpSquares may be the simple (and FREE) solution you are looking for. You can Bookmark the URLs for Administration interfaces along with the ability to launch SSH, RDP, or VNC from the JumpSquares Dashboard.

In Home Lab SRM Part 1 I set up the lab environment to appear as two separate “sites” with all the components necessary for SRM with Array replication. Now to configure SRM to protect VMs at both of my sites.

I have been running my home lab in Workstation for a good while now and it has served me well especially throughout my VCAP-DCA study. I am starting to do a bit more testing and proof-of-concept stuff with vSphere 5 and VDI so I need a little more.